Tunku's Silly Lists - Tunku Varadarajan’s lists in The Daily Beast of the top twenty-five “most influential journalists” on the right and on the left say a lot about what’s wrong with journalism today. For starters, there are very few actual journalists on either list. Rather, the lists are full of pundits and activists and opinion-pushers of various stripes, and the handful of true journalists who are included have mostly all transcended their humble reporter status to become, well, something more. Christiane Amanpour, for instance, is a journalist but also a media celebrity; Steve Coll writes important books and magazine articles, but he is also president of the New America Foundation. In other words, their “influence” is about something more than just their journalism.